When Partnerships for Schools (PfS) holds it's annual conference later this month, it aims to put across an upbeat and optimistic account of the improvements it has made to the government's £45bn Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.
The head of PfS (a government organisation set up to mastermind both BSF and the academies programme) is keen to impress on conference delegates from schools, local authorities and private sector companies "the radical turnaround" that the sometimes controversial BSF programme has witnessed over the last year or so.
"We are now rolling the programme out, and it is going faster, as well as being more cost-effective," says chief executive Tim Byles. "People are not just thinking about bricks and mortar in their new schools but are capturing the vision locally — from parents, students and teachers — and linking that in with local regeneration projects."
BSF is the single most ambitious programme of school construction since the Victorian era. It aims to rebuild or refurbish every one of the country's secondary schools over its 15-year programme and, in the process, transform the teaching and learning that goes on in those schools. Information communications technology will play a major part, with new facilities fully integrated across schools rather than hived off in separate computer suites. Another strong theme is forging links with local communities and enabling them to share school facilities.
Launched in 2003, the BSF programme's original target — which it fell woefully short of — was to open 100 new schools by the end of the 2007/08 tax year. By this summer, only 13 were complete, including Oxclose community school, Sunderland (pictured above). In response, the Childrens, Schools and Families Commons select committee stated: "What does matter is whether those authorities who have suff ered delays have resolved problems and come up with proposals that are robust and achievable." In fact, a further 22 new schools will open their doors this month and 80 local authorities and more than 1,000 schools are now engaged in BSF projects. Byles anticipates that 35 schools will open in 2008/09, increasing to about 200 per year from 2011 onwards.
Byles and his team have been encouraged by new research by the National Foundation for Educational Research on Bristol Brunel Academy, one of the first BSF schools, which found that the new school has had a positive eff ect on student attitudes and motivation.
Under fire
The quality of new school designs also came under fire in a report by the government's architecture watchdog, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), which assesses every BSF design before it goes forward for planning permission. In a detailed review of 40 proposed designs, including 15 BSF proposals, Cabe judged more than 80 % to be "mediocre" or "not yet good enough".
Barry Sheerman MP, chair of the House of Commons education select committee that will produce a second report on BSF later this autumn, was alarmed by the Cabe findings, and said his committee will investigate this further. But he was more positive about Byles' evidence to the committee earlier in July: "The PfS team have made a lot of changes," he says. "Tim Byles is playing an instrumental role in making sure that schools and local authorities coming new to BSF are learning from what's gone before."
Changes made by PfS include ensuring that local authorities that sign up for BSF projects are ready and properly resourced to go ahead and, from this autumn, are reducing the time and money spent on securing contracts for new schools (the procurement process). Local authorities are beginning to work together on procurement, which will save time and enable them to share project management skills. Environmental targets, not suffi ciently addressed by the first BSF schools, are "now impacting on all the designs", according to Barry Sheerman. To ensure better quality design for every school in the programme, PfS is in discussion with the Department for Children, Schools and Families to establish an objective set of criteria that all designs must meet.
Educational "vision" is seen as centrally important to BSF, but one of the challenges to the programme so far has been attempting to combine imaginative discussion about educational aims and aspirations (involving teachers and students as much as possible) with a more hard-nosed approach to contracts, timings and costs.
Ty Goddard, director of the British Council for School Environments, a charity/lobby group that aims to ensure that school building investment gives value for money, complains that the lengthy BSF procurement process "can feel like a treadmill that doesn't have innovation and creativity at its heart" . He would like to see more time devoted to discussion of BSF design by schools and architects. "We must not be imprisoned by a procurement process," he says. "We must always bear in mind what we are procuring and the 'how' shouldn't take precedence."
Split into five
John Matthews is principal of a new BSF school, Brislington enterprise college, opening this month in Bristol. He has constantly stressed the need for a new school "built on a human scale", which would divide his large school into five "communities" of 300.
"Once we had developed a coherent vision for the future, we could hold on to this through all the consultations with the bidders and keep bringing conversations back to it," says Matthews.
"As educationists, we have little experience of dealing with architects and construction people, and we could easily have been diverted. But having a strong vision allowed us to challenge the professionals as much as they were challenging us, and it became a dynamic relationship."
(Brunel and Brislington have both been built by Skanska with ICT managed services supplied by Northgate Education.)
Weblinks
BCSE: bcse.uk.net/default.asp
Cabe: cabe.org.uk
Northgate: northgate-managedservices.com
PfS: www.partnershipsforschools.org.uk
Skanska: skanska.co.uk
